Introduction to the Special Issue Social Commerce: A Research Framework for Social Commerce

TLDR

The rise of social networking sites has created new e‑commerce business models, termed social commerce, which leverage Web 2.0 technologies to enable online interactions and user contributions, but also pose novel research challenges that may define a major research arena in the coming decade. This introduction presents a framework that integrates key elements of social commerce research and summarizes the papers in the special issue. The framework classifies social commerce research into six elements—research theme, social media, commercial activities, underlying theories, outcomes, and research methods—and maps the special‑issue papers onto these categories. The framework helps define the scope of social commerce research and identifies potential research issues.

Abstract

The increased popularity of social networking sites, such as Linkedln, Facebook, and Twitter, has opened opportunities for new business models for electronic commerce, often referred to as social commerce. Social commerce involves using Web 2.0 social media technologies and infrastructure to support online interactions and user contributions to assist in the acquisition of products and services. Social media technologies not only provide a new platform for entrepreneurs to innovate but also raise a variety of new issues for e-commerce researchers that require the development of new theories. This could become one of the most challenging research arenas in the coming decade. The purpose of this introduction is to present a framework that integrates several elements in social commerce research and to summarize the papers included in this special issue. The framework includes six key elements for classifying social commerce research: research theme, social media, commercial activities, underlying theories, outcomes, and research methods. The proposed framework is valuable in defining the scope and identifying potential research issues in social commerce. We also explain how the papers included in this special issue fit into the proposed research framework.